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The Sugar RevolutionAuthor(s): B. W. HigmanReviewed work(s):Source: The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 53, No. 2 (May, 2000), pp. 213-236Published by: Wileyon behalf of the Economic History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2598696.

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Economic History Review, LIII, 2 (2000), pp. 213-236

h e s u g r r volutionBy B. W. HIGMAN

Of the many revolutions identified by historians, only one takes itsname from a particular commodity.' This is the sugar revolution, aconcatenation of events located in the seventeenth-century Caribbeanwith far-reaching ramifications for the Atlantic world. Unlike the morebroadly based revolutions typical of economic history-the industrialrevolution, the agricultural revolution, the commercial revolution, theprice revolution-the sugar revolution points to the transformative powerof a single commodity, resulting in what has sometimes been termed'crop determinism'. Determining influences have readily been attributedto other crops-rice, wheat, potatoes, for example-but none of thesehave given their names to the transformations with which they areassociated.2 Sugar alone has achieved that status.The six central elements of the sugar revolution are commonly regardedas a swift shift from diversified agriculture to sugar monoculture, fromproduction on small farms to large plantations, from free to slave labour,from sparse to dense settlement, from white to black populations, andfrom low to high value per caput output. More broadly, it is claimedthat the sugar revolution had five effects: it generated a massive boost tothe Atlantic slave trade, provided the engine for a variety of triangulartrades, altered European nutrition and consumption, increased Europeaninterest in tropical colonies, and, more contentiously, contributed vitallyto the industrial revolution. Not all accounts of the sugar revolutioninclude each of these features. Like most of the revolutions of economichistory, the sugar revolution concept has developed and diffused, tendingto take on new elements and expanding claims made for its significance.These claims have entered the mainstream of long-run global economichistory and development economics.3Generally, historians concede that the idea of revolution has served auseful role in the writing of history, giving shape and purpose to thetrajectory of otherwise seamless, continuous patterns. Indeed, the emerg-ence of history as an academic discipline and the modern understanding

I I thank Stanley Engerman, Howard Johnson, and Barry Smith for comments on drafts of thisarticle, Gregory Bowen for research assistance, and Ira Berlin, Pieter Emmer, Jock Galloway, RichardGrove, Franklin Knight, Brij Lal, and Ralph Shlomowitz for helpful suggestions.2 Scott, 'Defining the boundaries', p. 72; Earle, 'Staple interpretation'; Berlin and Morgan, Culti-vation and culture, pp. 4-5; Salaman, History and social influence, pp. 220, 333, 601; Bray, Riceeconomies, p. xiv; Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas, pp. ix, 4-8. For eccentric references to rice,tobacco, cotton, and breadfruit revolutions, most of them spawned by the green revolution, seeAbdul Hameed et al., Rice revolution; Wenkam, Micronesia, p. 11; Berlin, Many thousands gone,pp. 108-9, 142, 342-3.

3 Landes, Wealthand poverty, pp. 113-22. Cf. Cannadine, 'Present and the past'; Coleman, Myth;Overton, Agricultural revolution.C EconomicHistory Society 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 iJF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA.

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214 B. W. HIGMANof revolution as dramatic social and economic change occurred simul-taneously, about the time of the French Revolution. When the greattransformation attributed to sugar occurred, however, in the middle ofthe seventeenth century, revolution was still thought of in classical termsas signalling recurrence or restoration, a cyclical return to an earlier stablestate. These alternative models remain embedded in the debate in theliterature and in broader analyses of continuity and discontinuity. Dis-continuity may be conceived as a punctuation of secular patterns ofevolutionary change or as something more profound, inaugurating acompletely new order. It is the second formulation-the dramatic versionof revolution-that has concerned modern historians and it is questionsregarding the indicators and measurements applicable to the properattribution of revolutionary status that have fuelled the most vigorousdebate over the reality of, for example, the industrial and agriculturalrevolutions. However much historians may have come to recognize thediminishing utility of applying the term to particular places, periods, andevents, revolution remains firmly established as a key concept.4

IThe sugar revolution concept has its origins in the literature of Frenchand English colonization. In French, the first identified use of the termoccurred in Gaston-Martin's Histoire de l'esclavage dans les coloniesfran-,aises of 1948, where it was expressed as 'la revolution de la canne'. InEnglish, the earliest known use occurred in 1956 in A short history of theWest Indies by Parry and Sherlock, who titled their fifth chapter 'Thesugar revolution'.5 Gaston-Martin located the origins of the revolution inGuadeloupe c. 1650-70, Parry and Sherlock in Barbados c. 1645-60.These parallel accounts outlined the initial colonial settlement of theeastern Caribbean by white smallholders and indentured labourers cultiv-ating tobacco, ginger, indigo, and cotton; the replacement of these cropsand people by sugar and enslaved Africans; the amalgamation of small-holdings into large plantations; the great and sudden wealth of the newplanter class; the emigration of whites; and the consequent changes insocial structure and political organization. All of these aspects of thesugar revolution were interpreted as outcomes deriving directly from thebiological and agricultural requirements of the sugarcane and the pro-duction function of sugar making.Contemporary observers, from the 1650s, were aware of at least someof these changes taking place around them, but the association with'revolution' emerged only gradually along with the establishment of ascholarly literature of European imperialism in the Caribbean. Satineauin 1928 referred to 'une revolution economique et sociale' in describingthe transformation of Guadeloupe c. 1665. He gave sugar and the sugar

4 Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, pp. 203-23; Ritter, Dictionary, pp. 388-91; Gerschenkron,Continuity, pp. 11-39; Rosser, Catastropheto chaos; Wrigley, Continuity, pp. 8-9.5 Gaston-Martin, Histoire de l'esclavage, p. 19; Parry and Sherlock, Short history, p. 63.

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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 215islands significant roles in French colonial history and in the Atlanticeconomy, yet tempered the revolutionary character of the transformationby suggesting the change was a lengthy process.6 Contemporary Britishhistorians emphasized the speed and intensity of change in Barbados andthe Leeward Islands compared with the 'more gradual' transformation ofthe French colonies, yet proved reluctant to apply the word revolutionto either case.7 The first writer known to do so in English was MacInnes,who in 1935 called the events in the British West Indian colonies 'anagrarian revolution'. This was something bigger than the sugar revolution,taking in the southern continental colonies as well as the West Indies,tobacco as well as sugar, and reaching into 'the African trade' and 'thegreat colonial trade' of the British. Several other writers offered versionsof 'revolution' in this period, giving the idea of social revolution particularrelevance, though often the concept as well as the term remained sub-merged.8 Thus the eventual association of sugar with the notion ofdramatic transformation and discontinuity, as occurred in the constructionof the 'sugar revolution', was indeed a significant moment.Modifications of the original sugar revolution concept and term havetaken several forms. In 1961 Lasserre distinguished the 'revolution sucri-ere' of the seventeenth century from a 'revolution industrielle' of thenineteenth century which involved changes in technology and organizationinternal to the sugar industry. Further, Lasserre divided this industrialrevolution into two stages: the first (in the 1840s) saw the establishmentof central mills, and the second (1875-1900) the emergence of latifundia.This was a distinction with application in the British as well as theFrench West Indies, and came also to be used for Cuba to which a full-scale sugar revolution was first attributed by Knight in 1970.9The early 1970s witnessed a sudden increase in monographs directlyconcerned with the sugar revolution of the seventeenth century, notablythree works by American historians on the English West Indies. In Nopeace beyond the line (1972), Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh made largeclaims for the 'agricultural and industrial miracle' that began in theEnglish and French West Indies in the 1640s, a change that 'completelytransformed their society and economy'. The transfer of sugar from Brazilto the West Indies required the transplantation of 'an entire culture',they said, and 'few enterprises in the history of agriculture in moderntimes approach this in ingenuity, completeness, and in ultimate economicconsequences'. The introduction of the 'sugar complex' became 'a centralconcern in the economic history of the seventeenth century'. Bridenbaughand Bridenbaugh twice referred to this transformation as a 'social revol-ution' and twice as an 'ecological revolution'. They saw the shift from'incipient rural societies of white, English-speaking Europeans' to theslave plantation and an African population as 'the most thoroughgoing

6 Satineau, Histoire de la Guadeloupe, pp. 112-13; May, Histoire 9conomique,pp. 206-20, 268.7 Harlow, History of Barbados, pp. 43-4, 292-328; Newton, Europeannations, pp. 197-9.8 MacInnes, Introduction, pp. 70-8; Williams, Capitalism and slavery, pp. 23-6; Deerr, History ofsugar, I, p. 160.9Lasserre, Guadeloupe,I, pp. 276, 290, 343, 390-1, 401; Knight, Slave society, ch. 2.




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216 B. W. HIGMANsocial revolution in the history of the New World'. Building on the workof Watts, they saw 'an ecological revolution of a thoroughly wastefulkind' that matched the 'human tragedy' of the social revolution. However,Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh used the term sugar revolution only onceand then in a narrow and restrictive sense: 'Of far greater import thanthe sugar revolution in the long perspective of history, as well as inthe years 1650 to 1690, was the radical change in the personnel and inthe nature of the inhabitants of the English West Indies.' 0 Here, thesocial revolution of earlier writers seems somehow to be disconnectedfrom the determinative role of sugar, in spite of the large claims madeby these authors for the global significance of the events.Dunn's Sugar and slaves (1972) similarly employed the 'sugar revol-ution' term just once. The switch from tobacco to sugar, he said,'made the Barbados planters rich overnight'. The planters amalgamatedproperties and, with the help of the Dutch, mastered the technology ofsugar making, imported enslaved Africans, and entered European markets.According to Dunn:

At first the Caribbeansugar revolutionwas pretty well confined to Barbados;production in the Leewards, Martinique, and Guadeloupedid not becomesignificantuntil the 1670s. Nonetheless, sugardid have a truly revolutionaryimpact upon the European pattern of colonization in the Indies. All of theEnglishandFrench islands inexorably ollowed the Barbadian xample, chang-ing from Europeanpeasant societies into slave-basedplantationsocieties.1Further, the sugar revolution brought the West Indian colonies undermercantilist 'surveillance' and made them objects of European conflict.But Dunn more frequently referred to a 'sugar boom' and, although heplaced much emphasis on the 'sugar and slavery system', his analysismade relatively little use of the sugar revolution concept.12 In the sameyear as the Bridenbaughs and Dunn (1972), Keagy wrote that 'A socialrevolution was coincidental with the sugar revolution' and, in an alterna-tive formulation, 'the introduction of sugar cane created a social revol-ution'; Lowenthal said 'Sugar brought a social as well as an agriculturalrevolution.' 3

Sheridan's Sugar and slavery (1974) gave greater prominence to theconcept. Based on a London doctoral thesis of 1951 supervised by F. J.Fisher, Sheridan used 'The sugar revolution' as a subheading in two ofhis chapters. In the first, on Barbados, he used the term several times,to draw attention to the island's 'numerous population of yeomen farmersat the beginning of the sugar revolution', the initial increase in indenturedas well as slave labour, the 're-emigration' of whites, the 'drift towardmonoculture', and the consolidation of land that 'proceeded ruthlessly as10Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No peace beyond the line, pp. 9-10, 68-9, 82, 86-7, 265, 276,348, 413; Watts, Man's influence.

' Dunn, Sugar and slaves, pp. 19-20.lIbid., pp. 62, 66-7, 90, 116, 151, 187-8, 334.13 Keagy, 'Poor whites', pp. 15, 25; Lowenthal, West Indian societies, p. 27. Also in 1972, Curtin,'Atlantic slave trade', p. 250.




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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 217the sugar revolution gained momentum'. Thus, for Sheridan, the sugarrevolution was essentially economic rather than social.'4 His analysisadded a new dimension, emphasizing changes in agricultural techniquesthat responded to the initial environmental depredations of the sugarrevolution. Here Sheridan supported the interpretation of Watts whoargued that the 'cane hole agriculture' of Barbados was a rational responseto the catastrophic soil loss which followed the destruction of forest andthe rush to be rich. But such 'high farming' was a longer-term conse-quence of the sugar revolution rather than an immediate feature. Indeed,it was one of the ways in which Barbados quite quickly became anexceptional sugar colony. Later, in 1984, Sheridan noted that the Briden-baughs and Dunn showed 'how the sugar revolution transformed theagricultural economy and effected a thoroughgoing social revolution'.15These three histories of the English West Indies remain the principalgeneral accounts of the colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-turies and the most detailed interpretations of the sugar revolution. Thereare no equivalent volumes for the French territories, though the conceptmakes regular appearances. Price, in his France and the Chesapeake(1973),saw 'a silent revolution' in the years 1640-70 in Guadeloupe, Martinique,and St Christopher, marked by a 'gradual' retreat from tobacco and 'theinexorable advance of sugar'. For Price, the 'social meaning' of thetransition to sugar was to be found in the replacement of the whitepeasantry by large slave plantations.16 In the course of a monetary historyof Guadeloupe published in 1979, Buffon remarked: 'La revolution dela canne 'a la fin du XVIIe siecle a transformed a vie economique etsociale des miles;es colons, ruins par la crise du tabac, doivent vendreleurs terres aux habitants sucriers; l'esclavage apparaft comme le seulmode rationnel d'exploitation.' More interestingly, elsewhere in that workhe referred to 'la premiere revolution sucriere' and, following the lead ofLasserre, distinguished it from 'la revolution industrielle' of the nineteenthcentury. The first was that of the seventeenth century, marked by theformation of plantations ('habitations'), the decline of 'les petites propri-etes rurales', and 'le recours systematique 'ala main-d'oeuvre servile'. The'revolution industrielle' was divided into two stages, thus contributing tothe emerging idea of phases in the evolution of the sugar industry andthe possibility of multiple sugar revolutions.17The notion of multiple sugar revolutions was closely associated withthe application of the idea to other times and places, notably Cuba inthe nineteenth century. Perhaps the first to do this fully was the Jamaicanhistorian Knight in his Slave society in Cuba during the nineteenthcentury(1970). Knight placed Cuba at the end of an extended diffusion of sugar

14 Sheridan, Sugar and slavery, pp. 128-34, 141-3, 395. A summary of these arguments appearedin idemaDevelopment, pp. 27-33, and later refinements in idem, 'Domestic economy', pp. 46-53.15 Sheridan, Sugar and slavery, pp. 140-1; idem, 'Domestic economy', pp. 48-9; Watts, 'Origins'.Cf. Dunn, Sugar and slaves, p. 90.16 Price, France and the Chesapeake, I, pp. 75-7.17 Buffon, Monnaie et credit, pp. 19, 42, 262-3; Lasserre, Guadeloupe,I, pp. 352-6, 391. Cf. Gaston-Martin, Histoire de l'esclavage, pp. 23-4.

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218 B. W. HIGMANand the plantation, beginning with Cyprus in the middle of the fifteenthcentury, saying that 'it was only when most other societies were turningaway from slavery as an economic system and a form of labor organizationthat the Cubans became involved in the agricultural revolution that hadentered the Caribbean Sea in the early seventeenth century.' The 'sugarrevolution' of the eastern Caribbean provided the model for Cuba inseveral respects: dependence on tobacco in the 'preplantation era', 'arevolution in landholding' patterns and tenure, clearance of hardwoodforest, new methods of organizing slave labour, a vast increase in theslave trade, a demographic shift, and changes in international commercialand political relationships. Between 1763 and 1838 Cuba experienced'revolutionary changes' that transformed the island from 'an under-populated, underdeveloped settlement of small towns, cattle ranches, andtobacco farms to a community of larger sugar and coffee plantations'.Knight titled the second chapter of his book 'The sugar revolution ofthe nineteenth century' and in it concentrated on changes in millingtechnology, most of which occurred after 1838. Here he introduced thenotion of stages in the transformation: 'In the initial stages before 1838increased production depended on the proliferation of small units.' Thelater stages relied on the intensive use of steam power in mills andrailways, though, said Knight, 'the adoption of steam did not by itselfcreate a full-scale revolution within the Cuban sugar industry. ' LikeLasserre and Buffon, Knight termed this second stage of transformation'the industrial revolution' in the Cuban sugar industry.19

In Cuba, then, the sugar revolution could be seen as having two stagesoccurring within a century, whereas the two revolutions attributed to theFrench West Indies were separated by 200 years. However, in 1977Knight argued that the 'extensive and interrelated changes in thedemography, landholding and occupational divisions' of that periodshould properly be called 'the first sugar revolution, to distinguish it fromthe second revolution which took place principally in Oriente in theperiod 1905-1924'.20 This second revolution was the period in whichUS corporations pushed immense sugar plantations into the eastern endof Cuba, engrossing smaller units. Hoernel argued along similar lines:'The sugar revolution came late to Cuba and even later to Oriente.'Oriente's 'revolution in sugar' was 'a unique social transformation'. Itmeant, said Hoernel, 'revolutionary change as a result not only of foreigninfluence but also of foreign control and design calculated to produceboth modernization and Americanization 'I.21In 1978 Knight published a regional history, the index to which listed'sugar revolutions' though the text used only the singular form: 'Seen inthe conventional terms of the sugar revolution, it is quite clear thatthe English Caribbean islands tended to experience the first wave of

18 Knight, Slave society, pp. xviii, 3-17, 31, 194.'9 Ibid., p. 38; Mintz in Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and society, p. xxviii. See also Thomas, Cuba,p. 115.20 Knight, 'Origins', p. 234, n. 8.21 Hoernel, 'Sugar and social change', pp. 215, 217, 236.

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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 219intensification, followed closely by the French, with the Spanish coloniesbelatedly participating.'22 But, until 1978, no sugar revolution had beenattributed to Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. Historians of Cubawere equally reluctant to use the term, though they recognized the'profound change' associated with the transformation resulting from sugar,beginning with the 'boom' of the late eighteenth century and the 'longsugar orgy' which followed. Not only did the English 'sugar islands'provide a model for Cuba, but the occupation of Havana by the Englishin 1762-3 supplied an immediate stimulus to the emergence of a capitalistsugar economy.23 Cuban planters then travelled to Barbados and Jamaicato observe the plantation system and sugar technologies. British machineswere imported in quantity. In these ways, the British were seen to playa role equivalent to that of the Dutch in the seventeenth century.Similarly, it was from the subject literature of the British West Indiesthat the concept of the sugar revolution entered Cuban thought.24

IIIn the past 25 years, the sugar revolution has become a commonplaceof Caribbean history writing and development economics and been assimi-lated to a larger literature.25 In some cases the term is given capitalletters or placed in inverted commas, but it has clearly become a usefulshorthand for a complex process, readily recognized in contexts outsideparticular island histories. The term is never attributed to a particularsource, though the ideas of other writers may be criticized explicitly, andeven when the term is missing the concept is ubiquitous.Within the Caribbean, territorial contenders for the sugar revolutionhave not changed significantly. In 1984 Scarano applied the term toPuerto Rico, apparently for the first time, but his emphasis was somewhatdifferent from that of Knight's analysis of Cuba and from work on thesugar revolution of the seventeenth century. Scarano's use of the termwas social rather than industrial: 'the sugar revolution of the nineteenthcentury led slaveowners to exercise stricter controls over their chattel, tolimit opportunities for manumission, and to import such massive numbersof Africans as to completely upset the cultural configuration of the subjectclass.'26 Puerto Rico was a latecomer, but the transformation engenderedby sugar in the early nineteenth century, in some regions of the island,

22Knight, Caribbean (1978), p. 87. In the second edition (1990), p. 114, the text is amended to'sugar revolutions' but sugar is missing from the index.23 Moreno Fraginals, Sugarmill, pp. 18-28; idem, Ingenio, I, pp. 15-17, 68, 72, 96.24 Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and society, pp. 1-5.25 Akenson, If the Irish, pp. 71, 141; Blrald, Histoire economique,p. 26; Kupperman, ProvidenceIsland, p. 112; Beckles, History, pp. 20-3; Abenon, Guadeloupe, I, pp. 195-211, II, p. 16; Davis,

Slavery, pp. 58-72; Henry, Peripheral capitalism, p. 21; McCusker, Essays, p. 311; McCusker andMenard, Economy, p. 156; Stein, French slave trade, p. 7; Walvin, Fruits of empire, p. 136; Fogel,Without consent, pp. 18-29; Brenner, Merchantsand revolution, pp. 159-66; Engerman and Gallman,eds., Cambridgeeconomichistory of the US, I; Knight, ed., General history of the Caribbean,III; Canny,ed., Oxford history of the British empire, I, p. 226; Houston, 'Colonies, enterprises, and wealth',pp. 164-70.26 Scarano, Sugar and slavery, p. 164. Cf. Ramos Mattei, Hacienda azucarera, pp. 37-9.

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220 B. W. HIGMANmatched the consequences observed two centuries earlier. In 1993, how-ever, Martinez-Fernandez argued that, compared with Cuba, PuertoRico's expansion was shorter (confined to the 1820s and 1830s), morelocalized, and less far-reaching, so that 'If Cuba's sugar boom was arevolution, Puerto Rico's was a revolt.'27Earlier, in 1985, Moreno Fragin-als contended that although Cuba and Puerto Rico experienced an'industrial revolution in the sugar industry' this 'was not accompaniedby a complementary agricultural revolution'. It was a transformationlargely internal to the industry, with less far-reaching consequences thanthe sugar revolution of the seventeenth century.28 Historians of theDominican Republic readily agree that between 1875 and 1920 the sugarplantations of the southern zone experienced 'revolutionary changes' and'a virtual agrarian revolution', 'modernization', and a 'sugar boom', andthat changes in mill technology exhibited 'typical elements of the Indus-trial Revolution'.29 But the Dominican Republic remains without a certi-fied sugar revolution.The sugar revolution has also found a place in general histories ofsugar. Thus Galloway's The sugar cane industry (1989) both uses the termexplicitly and employs the concept broadly in ways that were unknownto Deerr's History of sugar 40 years earlier. Although the term itselfappears only once in Galloway's book, the concept is ever-present andmade to play an important role in attempts to understand the modemworld economy.30 Often the model provided by the sugar revolution hasbeen expanded to encompass the 'plantation revolution' as defined bySheridan in the late 1960s, and used to explain the subordination ofperiphery to metropolis as well as the impossibility of long-term economicdevelopment in plantation economies.31Other writers have placed the sugar revolution of the seventeenthcentury in the context of a longer pattern of evolution and diffusion.Thus Craton, in 1984, argued that New World plantations differed fromtheir Mediterranean precursors only in 'scale and intensity'. In his view,'the sugar revolution' (the plantation system established in Barbadosbetween 1640 and 1660) represented no 'critical revolutionary watershed',and indeed 'was no revolution at all'.32 This was an interpretation buildingon earlier work by Verlinden who contended that most techniques ofcolonization developed in the Atlantic, including the sugar plantation,had their ultimate origins in the eastern Mediterranean in the later middleages.33 On the other hand, studies of sugar in fifteenth-century Madeira,by Rau, concluded that, although the island's colonization, deforestation,

27 Martinez-Fernmndez, 'Sweet and the bitter', p. 59.28Moreno Fraginals, 'Plantations', p. 5.29Bryan, 'Question of labor', pp. 235-6; Del Castillo, 'Formation', p. 216; Baud, 'Origins', pp. 140-2; Moreno Fraginals, 'Plantations', p. 14.30 Galloway, Sugar cane industry,p. 115; Deerr, History of sugar; Mintz, Sweetnessand power, pp. 36-65; Meinig, Shaping, I, pp. 164-8; Scammell, First imperial age, pp. 44, 124-31.

31 Sheridan, 'Plantation revolution'; Stavrianos, Global rift, pp. 88-90.32 Craton, 'Historical roots', pp. 215-17.33Verlinden, 'Transfer', pp. 18-32. See also Braudel, M&diterranee, . 123; Wallerstein, Modemworld-system,p. 88; Galloway, 'Mediterranean sugar industry'; Davis, Slavery, pp. 58-63.




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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 221and development of sugar as an export economy within a period of just30 years was 'a truly extraordinary phenomenon', it was based on small-scale production units and limited slavery, and thus 'still far from thegreat sugar-cane plantations of future Brazil, with their slavery institutionsand their great mill and plantation owners'.34 A similar case was arguedin 1987 by Fernatndez-Armesto who termed Madeira's rise to prosperity'spectacular'. Sugar took over the island in as little as a decade. In theCape Verde Islands, in the 1460s, 'a new model was introduced: theslave-based plantation economy, unprecedented in European experiencesince the ancient latifundia.' On the other hand, Fernaindez-Armestoargued that although slave labour was used in the first sugar mills of theCanary Islands, the cane land was worked by sharecroppers.35In the most complete long-term study, The rise and fall of theplantationcomplex (1990), tracing the diffusion from the Mediterranean to theAmericas, Curtin concluded that the seventeenth-century sugar revolutionwas indeed a revolution, though 'that particular sugar revolution of theseventeenth century was only one among many'. Thus for Curtin themovement of the complex from Madeira to Brazil was a 'sugar revolution',as were each of the subsequent movements within the Caribbean, andbeyond to Mauritius, Natal, Fiji, and Hawaii. At the same time, Curtingave a special place to the sugar revolution of the eastern Caribbean,arguing that while it followed the 'institutional and economic patterns'established in Brazil, 'this new version of the plantation complex was morespecialized, more dependent on networks of maritime, intercontinentalcommunication. '36Barbados, said Green in 1988, 'staged the first West Indian sugarrevolution'.37 Galloway's account similarly placed Barbados at the coreof this 'social and economic revolution', but like Knight he argued for asequential spread in which 'the sugar revolution took hold in one colonyafter the other', increasing densities and shifting the demographic balancetowards enslaved Africans. Pushing the process back in time, Gallowayargued that the establishment of the sugar industry in the Mediterraneanaround 900 was part of an 'Arab agricultural revolution' but he did notterm those events a sugar revolution.38 Similarly, his account of thespread of sugar through the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Azores, theCanaries, and Sdo Tome saw the emergence of an agricultural systemincreasingly like the colonial sugar plantation of tropical America, butstill prototypical. Even Brazil, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies, lacked the full package of characteristics necessary for a sugarrevolution, and no historian, it seems, has applied the term, though sugaris seen as determinative of the social and economic life of Pernambucoand Bahia.39

34 Rau, 'Settlement of Madeira', p. 6.35 Femdindez-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 198-200.36 Curtin, Rise and fall, p. 73.3 Green, 'Supply versus demand', p. 414.38 Galloway, Sugar cane industry, pp. 33, 46, 80-2, 115.39 Ibid., pp. 70-8; Schwartz, Sugar plantations, pp. 15-26; idem, 'Colonial Brazil', pp. 423-53.

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222 B. W. HIGMANThere has been a similar reluctance to apply the term to the technologi-cal and organizational changes that transformed the sugar industry in the'long' nineteenth century, the period of Lasserre's 'revolution industrielle'.Between 1790 and 1914, argues Galloway: 'The gradual evolution thathad characterized the industry over the centuries from garden cultivation

in the Levant to the large plantations of the West Indies gave way to apace and scope of change that was revolutionary in comparison.'40 Inspite of this dramatic 'break with the past', it was to the period before1790 that Galloway applied the term sugar revolution. Schnakenbourgargued that in the 1840s the planters of the French West Indies intro-duced 'une veritable revolution industrielle', combining modern tech-nology formerly used in the beet sugar industry and the centralization ofmanufacture for neighbouring plantations in 'usines centrales'. Similarly,he described extremely rapid change in Guadeloupe in the second halfof the nineteenth century, technological changes which replaced the'preindustrielle' system, and compared the new technologies with theindustrial revolution in French textiles.41 However revolutionary thesechanges might have been, they tend to be considered internal to thesugar industry, with narrower implications than the sugar revolutionof the seventeenth century.42 They were global changes lacking globalconsequences. Thus the 'sugarcane revolution' that Randhawa identifiesin Java in the 1890s and in India in the early twentieth century wasmerely 'a revolution in the method of cane improvement'. As Lewisobserved, sugar was 'The only tropical crop to experience a scientificrevolution' before 1914.43 All of these changes were engrossed by thelarger notion of modernization. For example, although Larkin's study ofthe creation of 'sugar society' in the Philippines in the years 1836-1920recognized 'the universal determinism of sugar in societal development',he did not call the resultant 'transformation' of land, society, and politya sugar revolution.44 Title to the sugar revolution remains firmly locatedin the seventeenth-century West Indies.

IIIMintz, in 1964, described the plantation as a truly New World creation:'from the perspective of post-Roman European history, the plantationwas an absolutely unprecedented social, economic, and political insti-tution, and by no means simply an innovation in the organization ofagriculture.'45From the 1940s, French writers had emphasized the dualagricultural and industrial aspects of the transformation wrought by sugar,and referred to the sugar complex as an 'agriculture-industrie'. In 1985

40 Galloway, Sugar cane industry, p. 123.41 Schnakenbourg, Histoire, pp. 201, 205; idem, 'Disparition', pp. 257-9, 291-2.42 Beachey, British West Indies sugar industry; Heitmann, Modernization.43 Randhawa, History of agriculture in India, III, pp. 329-30; Lewis, Tropical development, p. 19;Galloway, Sugar cane industry, p. 194.44 Larkin, Sugar, pp. 2-6, 46, 167.45 Mintz in Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and society, p. xiv. See also Sheridan, Development, p. 55.

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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 223Mintz advanced the 'heretical' view that the sugar plantation was 'prob-ably the closest thing to industry that was typical of the seventeenthcentury'.46 Putting quantitative value on this argument, Fogel emphasizedthe scale of capital investment in sugar plantation land and machinerywhich created enterprises not matched in the US until after 1810.Eighteenth-century sugar plantations, claims Fogel, 'were the largest pri-vately owned enterprises of the age and their owners were among therichest of all men'. Sugar plantations also used 'some of the mostadvanced technology of their age', including 'a new industrial labordiscipline', this more than a century earlier than in the factories of Britainand New England.47 Paquette and Engerman in 1996 argued that in theperiod 1650-1750 sugar plantations involved 'a sophisticated integrationof production and processing and an intensive use of the factors ofproduction' that created 'some of the most advanced economic enterprisesin the world'.48 Blackburn, in 1997, further emphasized the 'modernity' ofthe plantation, seeing the 'military revolution' of 1560-1660 as supplying amodel for the plantation and the 'plantation revolution'.49Traditionally, the sugar revolution has not been associated with signifi-cant technological innovation. Thus Ratekin in 1954 argued that thesugar mills established in Espafiola in the early sixteenth century harkedback to those of tenth-century Egypt.50 Sheridan in 1960 claimed that,compared with the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, technologies of sugar cultivation and manufacture changed littlebefore 1800. 'With slight modification', he said, 'the system of Englishagriculture which was transplanted in the tropics during the seventeenthcentury persisted for nearly two centuries.'5' This notion of technologicalstagnation was long attributed to the backwardness of the planters as aclass and the ways in which slavery inhibited innovation. The constructionof the planters as economic rationalists, a development parallel to theacceptance of the neutralizing sugar revolution concept, necessarily castdoubt on the entire package of ideas linked with backwardness anddecline and fall.52Thus recent scholarship has questioned the underlyingassumptions, providing evidence of experiment, invention, and the adop-tion of new technologies, from the techniques of cultivation to millmachinery. Most of this research relates to periods outside the usualtiming of the sugar revolution, but some of it does suggest a very early

46 Magalhaes Godinho, 'Industrie et commerce', p. 543; Mintz, Sweetness and power, p. 48.47 Fogel, Without consent, pp. 23-6.48 Paquette and Engerman, eds., LesserAntilles, p. 6.49 Blackburn, Making of New Worldslavery, pp. 229-31, 242, 335, 419, 511, 589; Parker, Militaryrevolution,p. 1.50 Ratekin, 'Early sugar industry', pp. 4-7.51 Sheridan, 'Samuel Martin', p. 126.52 Mintz in Guerra y Sinchez, Sugar and society, p. xxi; Edel, 'Brazilian sugar cycle', p. 31; Batie,'Why sugar?', pp. 17-27; Merivale, Lectures;Williams, Capitalismand slavery; Gray, History of agricul-ture, I, pp. 437, 444-5.


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224 B. W. HIGMANwillingness to experiment, adopt, and adapt, particularly in milling tech-nology.53Barbados retains its place as the archetype of the sugar revolution andhas been the focus of the most sophisticated technical studies. Most ofthis work has been concerned with the transition from white indenturedto black enslaved labour. Economic and counterfactual modelling hasbeen applied to the labour question in several studies, many of themcomparing the experience of the sugar colonies with that of the tobaccocolonies of the mainland. An uneasy consensus has emerged that thesugar planters' shift to slave labour was the product of rational marketchoice. What is most important for present purposes is that these analysesare explicitly set in the context of the 'sugar revolution' while rejectingthe deterministic and racial interpretations of earlier scholars.54However,climate and race have proven hard to shake off, resurfacing as perceptionsand attitudes or as active biological agents. For example, Eltis has arguedthe importance of non-economic factors in the choice of enslaved Africansover indentured whites, a choice ensured by the fact that 'the sugarrevolution proceeded too quickly to allow Europeans to adjust perceptionsof insiders and outsiders'.55Archival research on sources of capital for the sugar revolution hasbeen carried out for Jamaica by Zahedieh and for Cuba by Knight. Theirfindings are similar, showing that internal sources were more importantthan metropolitan, supporting the argument of Pares against AdamSmith.56 Contributing to this interpretation, Emmer has questioned thelong held view that the Dutch 'catalyzed the sugar revolution in theLesser Antilles if they did not originate it', but regrettably, existingarchival evidence is insufficient to enable calculation of the volume ofinvestment and trade. Emmer doubts that the Dutch offered generouscredit, after their experience in Brazil, and, in any case, 'several of thewealthy planters in the Caribbean themselves could have financed theirpurchases of slaves and equipment'.57 Efforts to estimate wealth andincome flows generated by the sugar revolution have been few andinhibited by empirical deficiencies. Only Eltis's estimates of total and percaput product for Barbados in the 1660s fall within an accepted periodof the sugar revolution; other studies generally relate to later years. It isimportant to note, however, that Eltis does confirm the 'extraordinarilyhigh incomes' of the planters of Barbados. Even if slaves and servantsare included, per caput incomes were high by comparison with the NorthAmerican colonies or the English homeland. The strong performance ofthe Caribbean sugar colonies before 1700 made them 'far more significant

53 Galloway, 'Tradition and innovation'; idem, Sugar cane industry; Ormrod, 'Evolution of soilmanagement'; Satchell, 'Early use of steam power'; McCusker, Essays, p. 324; Daniels, 'Agro-industries'; Daniels and Daniels, 'Origin'.54 Vignols, 'Question mal posee'; Thompson, 'Climatic theory'; Galenson, White servitude,pp. 149-51; Beckles, White servitude; Beckles and Downes, 'Economics of transition', pp. 226-30; Green,'Supply versus demand', pp. 403-6; Bean and Thomas, 'Adoption', pp. 377-98.

55 Eltis, 'Europeans', p. 1422; Coelho and McGuire, 'African and European'.56 Zahedieh, 'Trade'; Knight, 'Origins'; Pares, Merchants and planters, p. 50.57 Emmer, ' Jesus Christ ', pp. 211-12.

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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 225than any other region of the Americas', and Eltis concludes that 'in itscapacity to generate high-value exports relative to both its physical anddemographic size, Barbados was a new phenomenon in the Atlanticworld. '58Studies of changes in land tenure and distribution based on intensivework in archives remain rare, though the pattern in Barbados before andafter the sugar revolution has become better understood, as has thedistribution and scale of slaveownership. The apparent impact of thesugar revolution is moderated, showing that large holdings existed beforesugar and that smallholdings survived the spread of monoculture in manyisland niches. According to Sheridan, the notion 'that the big plantersbought up all the land in the sugar colonies is a myth'.59 Demographicstudies have also become increasingly refined, though hampered by datadeficiencies for the central years of the sugar revolution.60The transform-ation of environment and landscape has been traced by Watts, showingthat deforestation and spectacular erosion followed the path of the sugarrevolution, creating a significant ecological discontinuity.6' The politicalemphasis of earlier writers has also been revisited. Craton, for example,argued in 1995 that the introduction of sugar to Barbados initiated acomplex 'socioeconomic and therefore political revolution'.62

IVThe sugar revolution has been given a large role in the commercialrevolution and English imperial expansion in the seventeenth century.63The significance of sugar in English trade has long been acknowledged.Zahedieh, for example, stated that 'sugar quickly became England'sleading colonial import and, from its first arrival on the market in the1640s, yielded a far higher and steadier profit than any other Americancash crop'. In the period 1600-1800, argued Fogel, slave-produced sugarwas 'the single most important of the internationally traded commodities,dwarfing in value the trade in grain, meat, fish, tobacco, cattle, spices,cloth, or metals'.64 According to McFarlane: 'The shift towards sugartransformed England's relations both with its Caribbean colonies andwith its colonial settlements as a whole, forging economic links whichturned the scattered American territories into an interconnected systemwhich more properly resembled an empire.' The West Indies were essen-tial to the economic development of the non-plantation colonies north ofVirginia, and the islands served as a springboard for the spread of slavery

58 Eltis, 'Total product', pp. 334-7; Sheridan, 'Wealth'; Ward, 'Profitability'.59 Sheridan, 'Domestic economy', p. 51. See also Pares, Merchants and planters, pp. 18-19, 66n. 35; Niddrie, 'Attempt'; Innes, 'Pre-sugar era'; Campbell, 'Aspects'.60Beckles, Whiteservitude, pp. 13-23, 125-34; Puckrein, Little England, pp. 65-7, 147-59.61 Watts, Man's influence;idem, WestIndies, pp. 228-31; Richardson, Caribbean, p. 30.62 Craton, 'Property and propriety', pp. 503, 507. See also Brenner, Merchants and revolution,pp. 165-6.63 Moreno Fraginals, 'Plantations', p. 9, refers to a 'commercial revolution', c. 1870-1900, and'what can be called the revolution of the sugar trade'.64 Zahedieh, 'Trade', p. 206; Fogel, Withoutconsent,pp. 21-2; Farnie, 'Commercial empire', p. 210.

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226 B. W. HIGMANin the South. The Barbados 'sugar revolution', contended McFarlane,'created an archetype' for the development of a larger British West Indianeconomy, 'bound to England and the North American colonies by thecircuits of an increasingly sophisticated system of transatlantic and inter-colonial trade'.65 More broadly, the sugar revolution was a powerfulimpetus to the development of 'triangular and multilateral trades' thatinvolved Africa through the slave trade, and Ireland through trade inprovisions and livestock.66The impact on Africa's economic structure and trade is comparable.For example, in 1993 Searing argued that the Atlantic economy reachedinto the Senegal in the late seventeenth century, exposing it for the firsttime to an external dynamic. This dynamic had its source in the plan-tations of the Americas: 'The sugar revolution drove the wheels ofmercantilist capitalism like a mighty wind, propelling ships and cargoesof trade goods to the shores of West Africa, where the Atlantic worldpurchased the slaves whose sweat and blood fed the engines of economicgrowth.'67 Earlier, Frank argued that an important, 'perhaps the major,contribution to the eighteenth-century commercial revolution came fromthe sugar revolution and the associated slave and triangular trade'.68These are arguments building on the work of Williams, Pares, andSheridan, but now firmly located within European and Atlantic economichistory and explicitly linked to the consequences of the sugar revolution.Recent studies of the history of sugar have introduced new elements,particularly the negative consequences for consumers, making sugar adouble disaster rather than an entrepreneurial achievement. Sugar is nowseen as an addictive substance, nutritionally superfluous, the source oftooth decay, obesity, and cardiovascular problems, a commodity barelypreferable to the tobacco it often replaced. The sugar revolution hascome to be placed at the symbolic centre of the 'consumer revolution'and at the heart of European dietary transformation associated with theindustrial revolution. From a luxury good, sugar became a commodityof common consumption, and in this way, argued Mintz, sugar 'epitom-ized the transition from one kind of society to another'. Further:

The first sweetenedcup of hot tea to be drunk by an English workerwas asignificant historical event, because it prefiguredthe transformationof anentire society, a total remaking of its economic and social basis. We muststruggleto understand ully the consequencesof that and kindredevents, forupon them was erected an entirely differentconception of the relationship

65 McFarlane, British in the Americas, pp. 129-32. See also Holmes, Making of a great power,pp. 64-5; Sheridan, Development, p. 70.66 Clay, Economic expansion, II, pp. 168-78; Solow, 'Capitalism and slavery', pp. 730-1; Truxes,Irish-American rade, pp. 13-19.67 Searing, West African slavery, p. 27.68 Frank, Worldaccumulation, p. 120.




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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 227between producers and consumers, of the meaning of work, of the definitionof self, of the nature of things.69

The full significance of this event comes into clearer focus throughcomparison with the history of sugar in China. There, although sugarcaneproducts were used from ancient times, sugar never became a food ofcommon consumption. Further, although China was the site of fundamen-tal innovation in sugar cultivation and manufacture, sugarcane was nevera monoculture nor was it produced on plantations or by slaves. In China,sugar never became the centre of a dietary or social revolution.70

VThe sugar revolution concept has now been tried and tested for half acentury. Has it successfully survived that testing and does it remain auseful way of understanding the events it attempts to comprehend? Wasthe sugar revolution a fundamental historical discontinuity? The term hasbeen broadly accepted and users have rarely questioned its validity orbeen explicitly critical. Sometimes it has been employed merely as adramatic device, but, as the term has moved from a general to a morespecialized literature, it has been required to carry correspondingly greateranalytical weight.In order to attempt a critique of the sugar revolution concept, it isnecessary to consider first the precision of its definition. Three distinctuses are identifiable in the literature. First, the sugar revolution is some-times taken to mean primarily a shift to sugar production from othereconomic activities (typically tobacco growing). This usage, which isrelatively recent, makes other events (such as changes in land and labour)'consequences' of the sugar revolution or coincidental constituents.71Secondly, some writers have emphasized the social aspects of the tran-sition: the shift from white indentured to black slave labour and theemigration of the white yeomanry. This was the form in which the sugarrevolution concept was born, the social revolution of Gaston-Martin andof Parry and Sherlock. Both of these meanings focus firmly on events inthe Caribbean. The third definition is much more wide ranging,encompassing changes in economy, demography, society, and politics,not merely in the Caribbean but throughout the Atlantic' world, andcreating models of modernity. This last definition has attracted a growingband of advocates.Although these three definitions are readily distinguishable, they fre-quently intersect and writers seem not always to be aware that they are

69Mintz, Sweetness and power, p. 214. See also Thomas and Bean, 'Fishers of men', p. 914;Crosby, Ecological imperialism,pp. 77-8; Hobhouse, Seeds, pp. xiv, 58-66; Austen and Smith, 'Privatetooth decay'; Zahedieh, 'London', p. 243; Walvin, Fruits of empire, p. 125; McKendrick et al., Birthof a consumersociety; Komlos, 'New World's contribution', pp. 71-3.

70 Daniels, 'Agro-industries', pp. 79, 87, 93; Mazumdar, Sugar and society in China, pp. 1-4, 138-60, 171, 193-4, 421 n. 2, 498 n. 37.71 Keagy, 'Poor whites', p. 15; Galenson, Traders, pp. 7-43; Green, 'Caribbean historiography',pp. 513-14; Hoyos, Barbados, pp. 32-46.

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228 B. W. HIGMANtalking about different things. This is not an unusual situation. Theshifting meaning of the sugar revolution has parallels in, for example, thesubject literature of the industrial revolution and the agriculturalrevolution.72 It remains an important issue, however, because it affectsexplanation and interpretation. Whereas most writers see sugar as determi-native, and the shift to sugar as the cause of the shift to slave labour,some make the shift to slavery a necessary condition of the shift tosugar.73The same applies to the causal relations between sugar and theplantation, and hence the creation of what Sheridan termed the plantationrevolution. What is at stake here is the determinative status of sugar, asplant, commodity, and symbol. If sugar was not truly determinative, itmight be better to call the sugar revolution something else-perhapsSheridan's plantation revolution, or a social or economic or industrialrevolution-or to dismiss it as a myth. Most of the revolutions in thesubject literature have come to be termed myths and inventions, at onetime or another, but the survivors appear remarkably resilient.It is true that the processing of sugarcane must take place quickly afterits harvest, preferably within a day or two, and that economies of scalemake the capital equipment of factories a costly investment. These factsare basic to the notion that sugar could be produced profitably in theseventeenth century only on large plantations.74 Davis, for example,argued in 1973 that this outcome was determined by 'a simple fact oftechnology'. Further, he said, to produce sugar on an efficient scale, theplantation 'required a large concentration of fixed-capital, and the ownerof the capital wanted a completely subordinated and rigidly disciplinedlabour force'. The result was that 'sugar transformed society in everyarea it touched, because of the economies of scale that large productiveunits offered'.75 However, both modern and historical experience showthat sugar can in fact be produced profitably by a range of systems.Small farmers can and do cultivate cane and sell to large central mills,the mill being owned by the farmers themselves through co-operativearrangements or by independent corporations or the state. Somethinglike this seemed a possible outcome in seventeenth-century Barbados andthe Leeward Islands. Crushing mills and boiling equipment could bemade mobile, as in southern China.76 What prevented this form ofdevelopment was not so much any technological requirements of sugarbut rather the desire of individuals to take all of the profits by owning

72 Flinn, Origins, pp. 1-3; Cannadine, 'Present and the past'; Coleman, Myth; Temin, 'Two views';Overton, Agricultural revolution;idem, 'Re-establishing'; Kerridge, Agricultural revolution; Chambersand Mingay, Agricultural revolution, pp. v-vi.73 Green, 'Caribbean historiography', pp. 513-14; idem, 'Supply versus demand', p. 418; Briden-baugh and Bridenbaugh, No peace beyond the line, p. 57.74 Earle, 'Staple interpretation'.75 Davis, Rise of the Atlantic economies,p. 257.76 Pares, West-Indiafortune, pp. 103-4; Davies, North Atlantic world, p. 187; Shlomowitz, 'Plan-tations'; Ruthenberg, Farming systems, pp. 206-10; Attwood, Raising cane, pp. 214, 291; Cushner,Lords of the land, pp. 58-80; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, pp. 140-2; Rau, 'Settlement'; Green, 'Supplyversus demand', p. 417; Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and society, p. 78; Emmer, ' Jesus Christ ',p. 212; Scott, 'Defining the boundaries', pp. 71-2; Goldthorpe, 'Definition'; Daniels, 'Agro-indus-tries', p. 246; Mazumdar, Sugar and societyin China, pp. 324-6.




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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 229all of the capital assets, including land and labour, an outcome madepossible by the incipient pre-sugar concentration of land holding, theexistence of an enslaved population, and the moral acceptability to thecolonial state of the status of the enslaved.Another alternative method of organizing sugar production was theleasing of plantation land to tenants, as occurred early in Brazil and laterin Cuba and some British Caribbean colonies, through systems of canefarming. Indeed, it is the 'incomplete' character of the Brazilian transitionto sugar that prevents the application of the sugar revolution conceptto its experience before 1650.77 What occurred in Barbados was trulyrevolutionary because it took the Brazilian and Atlantic island modelsand transformed the prototype into a pure form. This transformation wasnot determined simply by the crop sugar, the smallness of the islands ofthe eastern Caribbean, or the need for intensive cultivation techniques,but depended on a set of social assumptions that must be questioned.Was any other crop capable of providing the foundation for such a radicaltransformation in the seventeenth century? Indigo is often mentioned interms of its demands on capital for complex processing plants, andtobacco supported slavery and the plantation system in Providence Islandand in Virginia, as did rice in South Carolina, yet the subject literaturecontains no 'indigo revolution' and (with the recent exception of Berlin)no 'tobacco revolution' or 'rice revolution'.78 It was sugar above all thatmade vast profits for its capitalists, consumed enormous numbers ofenslaved people, created plantation economies and slave societies, andshaped the modern world in ways other crops and commodities couldbarely approach. Approximately two-thirds of all the people carried inthe slave trade- from Africa to the New World went to sugar colonies.79It did not have to be that way. Sugar might have been much lessprominent on the world stage, produced by the much lamented yeomanry,with different consequences. But sugar made possible the great transform-ation, a disastrous development from so many points of view, and onthese grounds deserves to be associated with the revolution it engendered.To this extent, the sugar revolution remains a valid term. To the extentthat it attributes a determinative role to the crop and directs attentionaway from human agency, it reduces the moral responsibility of theactors and creates a neutralized concept for historical analysis. The sugarrevolution did not need to be recreated in each new location; once themodel was firmly established it spread naturally, the technological andenvironmental requirements of the crop reproducing familiar social andeconomic consequences wherever the plantation was imprinted on thelandscape.80

Schwartz, Sugar plantations, pp. 295-312; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, pp. 140-4.78 Pares, West-India ortune, p. 15; Davis, Rise of the Atlantic economies,p. 260; Solow, ed., Slavery,p. 28; Kulikoff, Tobacco and slaves, pp. 37-8; Scammell, First imperial age, pp. 124-5; Kupperman,ProvidenceIsland, pp. 175-80; Berlin, Many thousands gone, pp. 109, 142.79 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the cross, p. 16; Berlin and Morgan, eds., Cultivation andculture, p. 7.80 Galloway, 'Tradition and innovation'.




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230 B. W. HIGMANOne of the few critics of the concept, Davies, argued in 1974 that thesugar revolution model 'has the virtue of simplicity to recommend it butlike most models is a better servant than master'. His first criticism wasthat 'the sugar revolution nearly everywhere was a matter not of yearsbut decades or scores of years'.8' Only in Barbados, argued Davies, was

the sugar revolution truly present, the agricultural and demographic shiftoccurring there between 1645 and 1660. Other modern scholars haveoffered slightly different chronologies for the sugar revolution in Barbados,but almost all agree with Davies in seeing the transition as abrupt andradical rather than gradual. Perhaps the least rapid sugar revolution isattributed to Cuba, occupying the period 1762-1838 or even 1750-1850.This contrast with Barbados helps to explain why the sugar revolutionconcept was not quickly applied to Cuba, but historians generally appearuntroubled by the notion that the sugar revolution might extend overdecades or even more than 50 years in particular cases. Similarly, theyseem comfortable with the notion that the dramatic changes in Barbadosin the middle of the seventeenth century depended on a long history ofgradual development and innovation. By comparison with typical agricul-tural and industrial revolutions, the sugar revolution was indeed abrupt.Davies's conditions are unusually demanding.82Differences in timing and intensity, and in the abruptness of thediscontinuity, are negotiated through the notion of multiple revolutions.Problems of periodization are accommodated by dividing the process intophases or stages, and by identifying sequences, such as Knight's first andsecond sugar revolutions in Cuba. This solution parallels ways in whichhistorians have dealt with variations in the speed and timing of agriculturaland industrial revolutions. Certainly, the idea of multiple sugar revol-utions, occurring in different places over several centuries but sharing thesame essential characteristics, has not worried historians, and indeed itcontributes to the generalizing attraction of the concept.83 It also contrib-utes to the determinative role attributed to sugar. Caution is appropriatehere, however, because it is more convincing to argue that the initialexample of Barbados provided a model rather than that sugar requiredthe same outcome in every place. Davies's notion that, to be deservingof the title, the sugar revolution had to occur in the seventeenth century,seems unhelpful, as is the idea that every case ;required a 'pre-sugar'tobacco period and the displacement of a large white labour force.84 Onthe other hand, the idea advanced by some writers that the sugar revol-ution spread throughout the Caribbean, to every British and Frenchcolony, is clearly incorrect.85 In several significant territories, such as theDominican Republic and the British Windward Islands, sugar's triumph

81Davies, North Atlantic world, p. 180. Cf. idem, Royal African Company, pp. 14-15.82 Puckrein, LittleEngland, p. 71; Pares, West-Indiaortune, p. 14; Emmer, ' Jesus Christ ', p. 212;Akenson, If the Irish, p. 141; McCusker, Essays, p. 311; Mokyr, Lever of riches, pp. 42, 59; Crafts,British economicgrowth, p. 6; Wrigley, Continuity, pp. 8-12.83 Galenson, Traders,p. 7. Cf. De Vries, 'Industrial revolution'.84 Davies, North Atlantic world, pp. 180-9.85 Dunn, Sugar and slaves, pp. 19-20.




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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 231was never complete and these areas are not regarded as having undergonesugar revolutions even though their economies and societies have beentouched, heavily, by the crop. The 'non-sugar' territories of the Caribbeanare often termed 'marginal' and the economic history of the non-sugarsector has emerged as a significant category of study. It has been shownthat the non-sugar domestic economy survived the sugar revolution rela-tively well, even in Barbados.86 But the role of sugar remains secure,constituting the standard against which other economic activities aremeasured, in the same way as the pre-sugar period identifies the prehistoryof the Caribbean economy. Thus the sugar revolution constitutes thedefining moment of the region's economic and social history, a historycommonly characterized by the synergy of sugar and slavery.Is the scale and scope of the sugar revolution sufficiently great to meritthe attention of historians of regions other than the Caribbean andperiods other than the seventeenth century? The smallness of the islandswhich were the initial sites of the sugar revolution is often emphasizedand sometimes measured against the Isle of Wight which is slightlysmaller than Barbados.87 This is a comparison of little merit from aCaribbean perspective (where Barbados has long been known as 'LittleEngland'), or from a French or Spanish point of view, but it should notin any case be regarded as a disqualification. Indeed, the smallness ofthe islands of the eastern Caribbean was greatly to their advantage,reducing the costs of transport and providing access to European, African,and North American markets, as well as facilitating defence and internalsecurity.88In the Greater Antilles, sugar spread into the hinterland moreslowly than it developed along the coasts. Both islandness and smallnesscontributed to the success of the sugar revolution and to its initiallocation. The Barbados sugar revolution altered the output of sugarsufficiently to affect the luxury market, while in the eighteenth centurythe much greater production possibilities of StDomingue and Jamaicashifted consumption towards a mass market, and the Cuban sugar revol-ution of the nineteenth century added so much to the market thatprices collapsed.

The revolutionary status of the transition to sugar is to be judged interms of its structural significance as much as its immediate impact onoutput and consumption. For the internal histories of the Caribbeanterritories, the social and economic transformation consequent on theshift to sugar was indeed radical and fundamental. Knight has arguedthe case for Cuba: 'The historical importance of the sugar revolution layin its all-pervading effect on the structure of Cuban society and econ-omy.'89 In this way the sugar revolution is linked to that other basicbuilding-block of the subject literature of the Americas, the concept of

86 Sheridan, 'Domestic economy', p. 51; Shepherd, 'Livestock and sugar'; Eltis, 'Total product',p. 334; Parry, 'Plantation and provision ground'.87 Merivale, Lectures, p. 79; Leroy-Beaulieu, Colonisation, I, p. 116; Higham, Development, p. xiv;Pares, West-India ortune, p. 14; Hobhouse, Seeds, p. 59.88 Puckrein, Little England; Sheridan, Sugar and slavery, pp. 124-8.89 Knight, Slave society, p. 45.




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232 B. W. HIGMAN'slave society', in which the institution of slavery is as determinative aforce as sugar. In the larger history of the Atlantic economy, the sugarrevolution marks a genuine historical discontinuity, the significance ofwhich remains to be fully explored and interpreted.Australian National UniversityFootnote referencesAbdul Hameed, N. D. et al., Rice revolution n Sri Lanka (Geneva, 1977).Abenon, L. R., La Guadeloupe de 1671 a 1759: etude politique, 9conomiqueet sociale, 2 vols. (Paris,1987).Akenson, D. H., If the Irish ran the world:Montserrat, 1630-1730 (Liverpool, 1997).Attwood, D. W., Raising cane: the political economy of sugar in westernIndia (Boulder, Col., 1992).Austen, R. A. and Smith, W. D., 'Private tooth decay and public economic virtue: the slave-sugartriangle, consumerism, and European industrialization', Soc. Sci. Hist., 14 (1990), pp. 95-115.Baker, K. M., Inventing the French Revolution:essays on French political culture in the eighteenthcentury

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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION 233Coelho, P. R. P. and McGuire, R. A., 'African and European bound labor in the British New World:the biological consequences of economic choices', J. Econ. Hist., LVII (1997), pp. 83-115.Coleman, D. C., Myth, history and the industrialrevolution (1992).Crafts, N. F. R., British economicgrowth duringthe industrial revolution (Oxford, 1985).Craton, M., 'The historical roots of the plantation model', Slavery & Abolition, 5 (1984), pp. 189-221.Craton, M., 'Property and propriety: land tenure and slave property in the creation of a BritishWest Indian plantocracy, 1612-1740', in J. Brewer and S. Staves, eds., Early modernconceptions

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(1987), pp. 26-43.Gray, L. C., History of agriculturein the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (Washington,DC, 1933).Green, W. A., 'Caribbean historiography, 1600-1900: the recent tide', J. Interdisc.Hist., VII (1977),pp. 509-30.Green, W. A., 'Supply versus demand in the Barbadian sugar revolution', J. Interdisc.Hist., XVIII(1988), pp. 403-18.? EconomicHistorySociety 2000



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234 B. W. HIGMANGuerra y Sanchez, R., Sugar and society in the Caribbean: an economic history of Cuban agriculture(New Haven, 1964; first pub. in Spanish, 1927).Harlow, V. T., A history of Barbados, 1625-1685 (Oxford, 1926).Heitmann, J. A., The modernizationof the Louisiana sugar industry, 1830-1910 (Baton Rouge, 1987).Henry, P., Peripheralcapitalism and underdevelopmentn Antigua (New Brunswick, NJ, 1985).Higham, C. S. S., The development of the Leeward Islands under the Restoration, 1660-1688(Cambridge, 1921).Hobhouse, H., Seeds of change: five plants that transformedmankind (New York, 1987).Hoernel, R. B., 'Sugar and social change in Oriente, Cuba, 1898-1946', J. Latin Amer. Stud., 8(1976), pp. 215-49.Holmes, G., The making of a great power: late Stuart and early Georgian Britain, 1660-1722 (1993).Houston, R. A., 'Colonies, enterprises, and wealth: the economies of Europe and the wider world',in E. Cameron, ed., Early modern Europe: an Oxford history (Oxford, 1999), pp. 137-70.Hoyos, F. A., Barbados: a history rom the Amerindians to independence 1978).Innes, F. C., 'The pre-sugar era of settlement in Barbados',J. Carib. Hist., I (1970), pp. 1-22.Keagy, T. J., 'The poor whites of Barbados', Rev. Hist. Americas, 73-4 (1972), pp. 9-52.Kerridge, E., The agriculturalrevolution(1967).Knight, F. W., Slave society in Cuba during the nineteenth century (Madison, Wis., 1970).Knight, F. W., 'Origins of wealth and the sugar revolution in Cuba, 1750-1850', Hisp. Amer. Hist.Rev., 57 (1977), pp. 231-53.Knight, F. W., The Caribbean: the genesis of a fragmented nationalism (New York, 1978; 2nd edn.,1990).Knight, F. W., ed., General history of the Caribbean, III, The slave societies of the Caribbean (1997).Komlos, J., 'The New World's contribution to food consumption during the industrial revolution',J. Eur. Econ. Hist., 27 (1998), pp. 67-82.Kulikoff, A., Tobacco and slaves: the development of southern cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800(Chapel Hill, NC, 1986).Kupperman, K. O., ProvidenceIsland, 1630-1641: the other Puritan colony (Cambridge, 1993).Landes, D., The wealth and poverty of nations: why some are so rich and some so poor (1998).Larkin, J. A., Sugar and the origins of modern Philippine society (Berkeley, 1993).Lasserre, G., La Guadeloupe:etude geographique,2 vols. (Bordeaux, 1961).Leroy-Beaulieu, P., De la colonisationchez les peoples modernes,2 vdls. (Paris, 1908).Lewis, W. A., ed., Tropical development, 1880-1913 (1970).Lowenthal, D., West Indian societies (1972).McCusker, J. J., Essays in the economic history of the Atlantic world (1997).McCusker, J. J. and Menard, R. R., The economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, NC,1985).McFarlane, A., The British in the Americas, 1480-1815 (1994).MacInnes, C. M., An introduction o the economichistory of the British empire (1935).McKendrick, N., Brewer, J., and Plumb, J. H., The birth of a consumersociety: the commercializationof eighteenth-century ngland (1982).Magalhaes Godinho, V., 'Industrie et commerce antillais: sur le sucre des Antilles', Annales ESC, 3(1948), pp. 541-5.Martinez-Fernandez, L., 'The sweet and the bitter: Cuban and Puerto Rican responses to the mid-

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